[Tfug] NFS stale handle problem

[John Gruenenfelder]

Hello all,

I've been having an annoying problem with stale NFS handles on my PC.  A lot
of my working tasks are stored on my (also Debian) filesystem and I access
them via NFS.

I never noticed before, but I've recently been using Eclipse a lot writing a
large Java program.  It has about 25 source files open plus whatever state
files it keeps open.  After some period of time, usually > one hour, I choose
to sync with my subversion repository.  That is done over SSH even though it
resides on the file server.

Anyway, it's often the case that Eclipse will complain that one or more of the
files to be synced is pointing to a stale NFS handle.

Why is this happening?  If it is just one file, I can refresh that file view
in Eclipse and continue.  If it's more, then I have to quit and restart to
reload all the bad handles.  Also, if I look at the directory that contains
the file in question, I can see a bunch of ?????? in the 'ls -l' listing for
that file which I guess corresponds to a stale handle.

What can I do to make these go away?  And why are they occurring in the first
place?

I suppose before now I've not encountered it because I haven't kept files open
as long?  But... that's not true exactly, since I know I have previously and
recently programmed in Emacs and had groups of files open for long periods of
time and never had this issue.

It's not breaking anything else, but it annoying, especially since I don't
know the cause.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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